Sarah Childress Polk: What I Know Going In

Nothing. Except that she was apparently a “remarkable First Lady,” according to the title I have chosen for this portion of the blog – Sarah Childress Polk: A Biography of the Remarkable First Lady by John Reed Bumgarner. I chose the book because it was the only one I could find on Mrs. Polk that wasn’t written for children. It’s relatively short at less than 200 pages, so hopefully it won’t take too long to learn many new things. 

Image from Amazon.com

Julia Gardiner Tyler: Northern Socialite by Birth, Southern Secessionist by Marriage

Julia Gardiner Tyler. Image from Wikimedia Commons

Julia Gardiner Tyler (JGT) was born into a moderately wealthy and generally well-connected New York family in 1820. Her education included boarding school and a European grand tour, through which she underwent serious academic studies, learned proper feminine skills, and experienced the grandeur of European royalty against the visible poverty of many European cities and the famine in Ireland. When she was presented to the Washington, D.C., social scene in her early twenties, she was well-prepared to engage in both the heated political debates of the time and the flurry of social activity that netted her a prominent husband. While at least one critic would accuse JGT of fulfilling selfish and blind ambitions by flirting her way to the top, being seen as desirable while politically savvy and knowledgeable was an ideal expression of womanhood at the time that would have certainly attracted politically powerful and socially prominent men, including the president. John Tyler and JGT were married in 1844.  

While her mother expected JGT to fulfill her domestic duties while in the White House through more menial tasks like cleaning and redecorating, JGT preferred to spent her time serving as her husband’s trusted friend, hostess, and political aide. With Dolley Madison as a mentor, she made White House receptions as elegant as possible, added excitement to Tyler’s final year in office, and did all she could to use the receptions to aid in her husband’s bid for annexation of Texas. When it became obvious that Tyler would not seek reelection, JGT was disappointed that her time of national prominence was cut short but dutifully devoted herself to the life of a Southern wife at the Tyler retirement home in Virginia, Sherwood Forest.  

What I found most striking about JGT was her ability to adapt to the gendered expectations of her time when going from Northern socialite to First Lady to Southern plantation wife. Relatively indifferent to slavery as a Northern woman, JGT “enthusiastically embraced and defended Southern culture and its definition of womanhood” after moving to Sherwood Forest. While not immune from the influence of her upbringing and family in the North, she was intent on being a proper Southern wife and woman. She learned to manage a plantation of slaves but hired white women to help with rearing her children. She maintained an image of traditional wife, a gentle woman making personal sacrifices for the love of her husband, but became increasingly independent and honed her skills in self-sufficiency.  By 1853, she publicly defended the peculiar institution with a published pro-slavery essay in which she appealed to gender roles of proper Southern women who never criticized their homeland. When war finally came, she seceded along with the Tyler family, but took advantage of her Northern connections to find safety for herself and her children in New York after John Tyler’s death in 1862. Indeed, JGT remained in the North after the war, converted to Catholicism in the 1870s, and became somewhat more tolerant of people outside her own race and class.  

In some ways, JGT lived an opposite trajectory from Sarah Grimke, of whose life I recently read a fictionalized version in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings. Sarah Grimke lived with but despised slavery during her upbringing in Charleston, South Carolina. When accompanying her father on a failed attempt to rejuvenate his health in the North, she was introduced to Quaker ideals and dedicated herself to conversion. She eventually moved North permanently and became one of the most famous abolitionists of her time, along with her sister Angelina, by using her personal experience of Southern slavery to speak out against it. I think the lives of JGT and Sarah Grimke show how location and societal expectations can dictate how one lives and the way they choose to define themselves.  

When reading about JGT, I was also struck by how common it is for Presidents and First Ladies to live lives of wealth and comfort but to do so while buried in financial debt. The comparable situation that stands out most in my mind is that of Dolley Madison. JGT’s most significant contribution in this case was her fight for a pension for all surviving First Ladies. In 1881, Congress awarded her $1200 a year, but Julia argued for equality to Mary Todd Lincoln, who was awarded $3,000 annually in 1870.  After the assassination of President Garfield, the measure passed in 1882 at $5,000 annually for all Presidential widows—at that time Garfield, Lincoln, Polk, and Tyler—allowing JGT to live the last several years of her life in Richmond with her sons. 

Julia Gardiner Tyler: What I Know Going In

In finding a text for this entry of the blog, I have learned that John Tyler had four First Ladies (official and acting) during his presidency of just under four years. His first wife, Letitia Christian Tyler, died while her husband was in office, so her tenure as official First Lady was relatively short: 4 April 1841 – 10 September 1842. Even shorter was the tenure of Tyler's second wife, Julia Gardiner Tyler: 26 June 1844 – 4 March 1845. In between marriages, Tyler had his daughter-in-law, Priscilla Cooper Tyler, and, very briefly, his daughter, Letitia "Letty" Tyler, control hostess duties. From what I have gathered through quick scans of information online, Priscilla Cooper Tyler apparently took on White House hostess duties in place of Tyler's first wife, who was physically unable to do so, and continued on after Letitia's death until moving away from Washington in the spring of 1944.  

While this information should probably lead me to be reading two or even three books, I have chosen to read just one. There is no monograph-length piece on Letitia Christian Tyler. And while there is an older biography of Priscilla Cooper Tyler, written by John Tyler's great-granddaughter, I have decided to make things easier on myself and disqualify her as "unofficial" and focus on a biography of Julia Tyler written by an historian perhaps a tiny bit more objective than a family member. I have obtained a digital copy of Theodore C. DeLaney's 1995 Dissertation, Julia Gardiner Tyler: A Nineteenth Century Woman, which will serve as my education on this brief era in Presidential history. Yes, there is a massive biography of John and Julia Tyler by Robert Seager, first published in 1963. But who wants to read 700 pages of outdated pros about both John and Julia, when I can just easily get my hands on 300 pages of updated information on just Julia? Neither was available on the shelves at the public library, so the shorter female-centric study was the way to go.  

Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison: The First Lady Who Basically Never Was

I'm getting lazy about my blogging. I've been finding it hard to devote time to reading and writing after working full days. I've always been more of a TV watcher than a reader, even though I'm always reading something. So with keeping up with my shows, and what with getting married this past weekend 😍, I've been devoted to other things. Second, I'm getting tired of reading about Presidents instead of First Ladies because there is so little written about the ladies in this chunk of time. I'm hoping there are more books about the wives coming up soon. Whatever the reason, I've definitely lost my grad-school reading abilities. Back then, this 125-page William Henry Harrison book would have been "read" and analyzed in essay format within an afternoon. For this project, it took me months. Crazy!  

And when I say I'm getting lazy about blogging, I mean that I'm not even going to formulate my own essay here. I'm just going to copy some quotes from Collins's book that I think encapsulate who William Henry Harrison was in his time. I know it's basically cheating, but I really want to move things along (even if it's at this new and excruciatingly slow pace), and this way will work better than me trying to write my own thoughts because I generally hate writing and do it very slowly. Hopefully I can get back to real essay writing with Tyler and/or his wife.  

The few mentions in the book of Mrs. Harrison:  

"[c. 1793] Harrison returned to Washington, where he would soon be made commander. But first he was assigned to a blockhouse at North Bend, a settlement about fourteen miles west of Cincinnati. There, he had a chance to improve his relationship with Anna Tuthill Symmes, a calm, dark-eyed daughter of Colonel John Cleves Symmes. Anna's mother had died when she was a baby, and she was her father's pet. In a famous family incident during the Revolutionary War, he had disguised himself as a British soldier and crossed the battle lines with his four-year-old daughter to take her to safety with relatives in New Jersey. Anna was comfortable with frontier life, an excellent rider who seemed to have no fears of the dangers of the wilderness. (Her father wrote that his oldest daughter, Maria, who had married and moved to the much more developed city of Lexington, refused to visit the family in Cincinnati because 'the fear of the Indians deters her.') Anna was also well read, interested in politics, an eager consumer of newspapers and journals. As a girl, she had been sent to boarding school, where she was a classmate of Martha Washington's granddaughter, and later she would become the first wife of an American president who was known to have been educated outside the home.  [Honestly, this paragraph makes her sound fascinating; I really wish there was something more substantive written about her.]

"She first met her future husband in Lexington, at a party given by Maria and her husband, Peyton Short, a wealthy transplanted Virginian whose family had known the Harrisons back East. When the young Captain Harrison rode up to the Short mansion and saw the lovely Anna Symmes, the two fell into what they assured their children was love at first sight. William Henry found Anna 'remarkably beautiful,' and she was equally attracted. He had not inherited his father's corpulence. He was a thin man of medium height, with dark eyes and a large, straight nose that dominated his rather ascetic-looking face. He was extremely sociable, and among his generation he had an unusual combination of eastern gentility and western toughness. 

"Anna was twenty years old when Harrison asked for her hand. Colonel Symmes refused; he was reluctant to give his daughter up at all, and certainly not to a soldier. It's also possible that Symmes--who was a young officer at the fort--had unpleasant memories of the night Harrison was jailed for beating a drunken townsman. …. [He convinced her father he would support her with a military career, though he was already plotting a post-army career.] ….  

"Romance was going to triumph. Anthony Wayne supported the match, and the wedding took place, although without any help from the father of the bride. Exactly how the Harrisons were married is subject to debate. Some stories suggest that the couple gathered friends on a day when the colonel was out of town and pulled off a modified elopement, with a ceremony at the home of a friend. Other versions say that Anna was married in her own house, and that her father was present but stalked off in the middle of the ceremony.

"At any rate, the family was soon reconciled." [Harrison as hero of Indian wars, protege of General Wayne, well educated, and from one of VA's best families=good catch on the frontier] (21-22) 

"Anna Harrison, who never wanted her husband to run for president, was preparing to leave for Washington when word of William Henry's death reached her family. She stayed in North Bend, preparing a site for Harrison's final burial. ... Anna had borne more children than any other first lady but she would outlive all but one [John Scott]. Five of her six sons were already dead, and in the four years following William Henry's death, Anna lost all three of her remaining daughters. ...  

"Anna, who had always been interested in politics if not enthusiastic about her husband's involvement, kept close and disapproving track of William Henry's successor, John Tyler. But her main involvement in national affairs picked up on a theme of her husband's--lobbying important people in Washington to give jobs to her numerous grandsons and nephews.  

"In 1858, the fabled Big House/Log Cabin that had figured so centrally in American politics burned down. Anna moved in with John Scott's family, adding one more relative to a table that, like William Henry's, was crowded with nine children and other friends and relatives."  (oops, forgot to note the page here in my notes: probably 123, 124, or 125). 

A selection of quotes that well-summarize main points in the book or are just interesting:  

"Harrison's one-month term in office was really nothing more than a list of nonachievements (only president never to appoint a federal judge; his wife the only first lady since the construction of the White House who never saw it) and a cautionary tale about the importance of not making long speeches in the rain." (1)  

"Besides catching pneumonia during his inauguration, Harrison is famous for things he didn't actually do. He didn't win a big military victory at Tippecanoe--it was a minor fight against an outnumbered village of Indians, and because Harrison screwed up the defense of his camp the white American suffered most of the casualties ... He did better during the War of 1812. But his real impact on history arguably came from the work he did in the Grouseland years--acquiring several states' worth of territory from the Indians in deals that cost the federal government only pennies per acre. This is not a part of our history that we celebrate, and even back in 1840 the voters preferred stories of battlefield heroics." (4) 

"Politically, Harrison's greatest achievement was to star in what is still celebrated as one of the most ridiculous presidential campaigns in history. But even then, other men came up with the story line about Harrison the humble soldier and pushed it into the national memory forever with months of singing from The Log Cabin Songbook and dancing 'The Log Cabin Two-Step.' 

 "William Henry Harrison's own contribution was to become the first presidential candidate to personally campaign for the job, and he willingly plowed into crowds to shake endless hands and at least pretend to remember all the veterans who wanted to reminisce about serving under him." (4-5) 

[Harrison's inauguration was a nearly 2-hour speech on a rainy day with no overcoat, but not necessarily how he got sick. Perhaps trying to compensate for rumors that he was old tuckered out, Harrison walked everywhere in the early days of his presidency, even shopping for his own food. He was also "perpetually exhausted and beaten down by the demands of job seekers and by internal fighting within his party." (121-122)] 

"Harrison's body lay in state in the White House, in a coffin with a glass lid that allowed mourners to see the face of a president most of them had never actually gotten to know. On April 7, 1841, thousands of people lined the streets of Washington for Harrison's funeral procession. His horse Whitey trotted down the streets riderless, the traditional symbol of a fallen leader. Bells tolled, cannons were fired, and the parade of grieving dignitaries stretched for more than a mile. It was a blueprint for marking the untimely death of an American president that the country would continue to follow when Zachary Taylor and then Abraham Lincoln were lost, and ever after." (124)